I think Last Breath works great for one-shots or short campaigns, but I think there's a little bit of an issue with it as written for long-term play.

7-9, statistically, is the outcome that is most likely to come up since there's now +stat to the roll.  This means that most people who have to take this move are going to get a bargain with Death.

In the short term, I love it. Great flavor. Great consequences. Just a really cool idea. In a more long-terms game, where Death will be making deals time after time after time I see two ways to approach it.

1) Death: The Master Manipulator - With PCs likely having multiple deals with Death, you can't just fall back on the whole alignment change option time after time.  You have to start having Death make deals that either cause the PC to keep giving up pieces of himself (boring after the first time) or basically give out quests. If you fully embrace the latter, you have to dismiss that Death itself is impartial and instead has an active influence in the world. This line of thought can lead to some really cool events in play, I think, when you start to imagine the repercussions, but it isn't normally how we think of Death. Just think of the awesomeness that could spawn from the PCs being forced to become Death's hand in the world each time they die.

2) Death: The Flux - Each time you get the bargain result you make a deal that changes something on your character sheet. Alignment. Stats. Whatever.  As mentioned above, this is something cool in the short term that would end up suffering as it came up, time and again, in the long term.  It gets old.

My point is that I think there needs to be some other option for Last Breath for campaign play. Making continual deals with Death, if you don't go the route of #1 up there, will eventually get trite...which it should never be.  I'm in favor of there being a more mundane 7-9 option for Last Breath for games that plan to go the long haul. 

What do you think?

We played our first session with tonight (with 1.1) and had a blast. I have to say, as the GM, the topic of this very thread was the greatest stumbling block. Reviewing the sessions it seems that, as this thread points out, the interpretations of when and how monsters attack is very liberal right now.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing, at least for experienced GMs. I never dealt straight damage to the PCs this game, as that seemed a bit unfair to me, but would often rely on narrating an attack and then letting the PCs react. They usually Defied Danger and the outcome from that almost always ended up being a mix of narrative flavor and real damage.  It worked well for the group.

I do think a discussion of this should be somewhere in the rules though, instead of being left to inference.

When talking about this and potential lethalness, I think everyone has to remember the flip side of the coin. Don't be afraid to make monsters and traps as deadly as you want. We have another dial with which to tune things: Last Breath.

By defining Last Breath in different ways you can have a lot more down-but-not-dead situations.  Say I want to have a more pulply/cinematic campaign where the heroes get beat up but rarely die. I could simply redefine Last Breath as:

10+ PC lives and finds the will to live - regain 5 HP (maybe even take a +1 to the next roll)
7-9: Cling to life - stabilize at zero HP.
2-6: Die

You can make a million variations of that, even eliminating death if you like.  One of the great things about this ruleset is that it's really hard to do something completely broken.  There's a lot of levers and dials you can adjust to your group's preference. Unlike Sage and Adam we don't have to worry about finding a baseline that will appeal to both their vision and the game and everyone who plays it. We can take what they create and tailor it to what our group desires.